Robert Kaplan - Living With a Nuclear Iran

Sadly, the West has lost all resolve and gumption when it comes to containing and preempting belligerent states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Like an ostrich with its' head in the sand, the feckless and passive attitudes currently reigning supreme in Washington, London, Berlin, Brussels, and Paris, are woefully neglectful of the pending problems and changing landscape on the surface. The reliably insightful Robert Kaplan has an excellent article, "Living with a Nuclear Iran," that paints a poignant picture how to handle this brave new world in the latest edition of The Altantic. We are in for an bumpy ride ahead and the deferring the tough choices of the present while pay some ugly dividends in the years to come.

"At the time of his writing Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, some analysts took Kissinger to task for what one reviewer called “wishful thinking”—in particular, his insufficient consideration of civilian casualties in a limited nuclear exchange. Moreover, Kissinger himself later moved away from his advocacy of a NATO strategy that relied on short-range, tactical nuclear weapons to counterbalance the might of the Soviet Union’s conventional forces. (The doctrinal willingness to suffer millions of West German civilian casualties to repel a Soviet attack seemed a poor way to demonstrate the American commitment to the security and freedom of its allies.) But that does not diminish the utility of Kissinger’s thinking the unthinkable. Indeed, now that the nuclear club has grown, and nuclear weaponry has become more versatile and sophisticated, the questions that his book raises are even more relevant. The dreadful prospect of limited nuclear exchanges is inherent in a world no longer protected by the carapace of mutual assured destruction. Yet much as limited war has brought us to grief, our willingness to wage it may one day save us from revolutionary powers that have cleverly obscured their intentions—Iran not least among them."